In 1961, President Kennedy mobilised America with the mission to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and in 1969, Neil Armstrong fulfilled that mission, and was joined by Buzz Aldrin, while Michael Collins, who drew the short straw, could only circle and watch from the Apollo 11 spacecraft: in 1991, President Bush and the semiconductor industry are working up a plan for a similarly challenging – though vastly less expensive – mission for the nation – to develop a generation of chip by the year 2000 that in the normal course of events would not appear until several years after that; the aim would be to leapfrog the Japanese by developing the necessary process technology; according to the New York Times, a 1G-bit static that’s 125 Megabytes – is the favourite.
